Flip the script. If someone tries to kill us we are going to clam up and increase the Space Force budget 100000X and spend the next millennium doing nothing but building increasingly terrifying space weapons.
All someone would have to do to initiate communication with us would be to send Fibonacci numbers. This would be clearly intelligent. We could reply with some other series, then start playing ping pong with increasingly elaborate mathematical constructs to mutually construct a vocabulary. From there we could get to logic, then to statements, then to grammar, etc.
We know nothing about their minds or behavior but there is absolutely no way anything is getting into space let alone between stars unless it can do a lot of math.
That's one potential answer to the Fermi paradox: they are out there but doing everything they can to not be noticed.
PBS Space Time had a good episode a few months ago on this: "Dark Forest: Should We NOT Contact Aliens?" [1].
Here are a few things I believe alien intelligence may benefit from knowing about humans:
Humans are meddlesome trivial scamps.
Their thoughts feelings and beliefs are a threat to others.
Man is savage and beastial, and must be dealt with so.
I got that far before wincing. What pseudointellectual self-important vapid nonsense is this? How would "emotion" or "establishing a connection" possibly not involve transmission of information?
Say a friend is hungry and about to go get lunch. I'm eating a pizza and offer to give them half. They take it, eat, and are no longer hungry.
I might not have given them the pizza because I wanted to end their hunger. I might have given them the pizza to feel more positive toward me in hopes that maybe something more than friendship will develop.
Consider the example he used of asking someone how they are. Usually that isn't meant to actually find out how they are. The person isn't meant to take it as a genuine query as to how they are doing, good or bad. It's a customary greeting with an expected response along the lines of "OK" or "Fine, how about you?" or something like that.
Sure, there is information in that exchange, but it is not the information actually conveyed by the words of the exchange.
Well, then. That settles it. The "philosopher" has no idea what he's talking about.